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Thursday, February 15, 2007

We're still in the incunabular stage of electronic publishing

John Ottenhoff, Renaissance Women, Text Encoding and the Digital Humanities: An Interview with Julia Flanders, Academic Commons, February 2007.  Excerpt:

Julia Flanders is Director of the exemplary Brown University Women Writers Project and Associate Director for Textbase Development at the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group. With those projects and as Editor in Chief of the [open access] Digital Humanities Quarterly, due to launch in 2007, Julia is a key figure in humanities computing and text encoding initiatives. Academic Commons recently caught up with her to talk about her various projects....

Academic Commons: What's your sense of how faculty are using digital resources like WWP in their research? What kinds of changes are happening in their work, and what kind of obstacles are they facing?

Julia Flanders: At the moment, I think they're using digital collections in much the same way as they use collections of printed books: to find documents they're interested in and to read them. Searching helps to speed up this process; online access makes it more effortless and exposes readers to a wider range of material. But habits of reading are not yet changing very much.

The biggest obstacle is the granularization of online resources, and the lack of cross-collection analysis functions. This is a problem partly because of funding and intellectual property issues, but also because it is something fundamental about the incunabular stage of electronic publishing we're still in. Different projects are experimenting--appropriately!--with different kinds of markup, different approaches to representing materials in digital form. Those differences pose challenges for integrated searching, but they also represent important explorations into digital modeling. Tools like the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) are making it increasingly possible to find items across digital collections, but I think the more detailed analysis functions will have to wait until a further stage in the history of electronic publishing....